Premium
Tossing truths: improvisation and the performative utterances of Nichols and May
Author(s) -
STEVENS KYLE
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
critical quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.111
H-Index - 17
eISSN - 1467-8705
pISSN - 0011-1562
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8705.2010.01947.x
Subject(s) - performative utterance , improvisation , style (visual arts) , comedy , grasp , art , literature , linguistics , philosophy , aesthetics , computer science , visual arts , programming language
This paper theorises the style of improvisational comedy innovated by Mike Nichols and Elaine May in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Nichols and May's commentary relies on the listener's willingness to grasp – and to mock – conventions of ordinary language, and I recount the duo's history while examining their affinity to the contemporaneous work of J. L. Austin. Doing so allows me to demonstrate that Nichols and May complicate Austin's class of ‘performatives’ by recuperating the importance of truth, and that their work occupies a middle ground between referential and fictional language.